Questions of peasant marriage also concerned him greatly and in his best play, _Stolen Happiness_, which won a second prize in a competition at Lviv he criticizes the arbitrary way in which such unions were arranged. A soldier returns from his army service to find that the girl whom he loved and who loved him had been forced into marriage with another man. Such happenings were relatively common and they aroused the enmity of Franko as much as did the abuse of his people by outside oppressors. It would be too long to list all of his stories and collections which range from autobiographical studies as in the _Sweat of the Brow_, stories taken from adventures and incidents in his whole life, to studies of peasant customs in every form. In all of them Franko was willing to see the good as well as the bad and he gave invaluable pictures of Galician life in the period from 1880 to 1914. Yet it is to be noticed that in many of these stories as in the _Nobleman’s Pranks_, he has kind words for the representatives of the Austrian government at Vienna, who were mostly Austrian Germans, although some were of Slavic origin. This was only natural for Franko rarely left his native land except for the two years in Vienna. During his lifetime the Poles had a strangle hold on the government of Galicia. They were the direct oppressors of the people and the Viennese government in many cases tried to mitigate the iron hand of the provincial administration, partly from a feeling of justice and partly from self-interest. The Hapsburg policy had always been to allow a relatively free hand to the dominant group in a province and then to favor and help in minor ways the oppressed sections of the province. In this way they hoped to maintain a policy of “Divide and Conquer” and to facilitate their own control of the entire area.